El Greco has always been a bit modern for British taste and, almost 400 years after his death, the organisers of the first British exhibition of his work fear he may still be.

"We'll be pitching for a Tate Modern audience - if you liked the Chapman brothers you'll like El Greco, trust us," the curator, Xavier Bray, said yesterday at the National Gallery.

The exhibition will cover the span of his life, including his first and last known works, with international loans and many paintings which have never before left Spain.

The tortured blue-white bodies, lit by lurid flashes of lightning in a nightmare sky, have been revered by generations of artists, including Picasso, but have never been to British taste.

The National Gallery bought nothing until a studio version of his Agony in the Garden was acquired in 1919 on the advice of the critic Roger Fry. It provoked an outcry, and was compared with revulsion to the work of Cézanne - whom the gallery would not have touched with a bargepole at that date.

The art historian David Davies, an internationally acknowledged expert on his work, said El Greco was a very Catholic painter, and the British found it difficult to cope with his passionately devotional conceptual art, which turned its back on copying nature. The problem was neatly encapsulated by an earlier critic, who damned the work of the near contemporary Spanish religious painter Zurbaran: "Not really suitable for our castles, our climate or our creed."

The artist formerly known as Domenikos Theotokopoulos trained as an icon painter in his native Crete before moving to Spain and acquiring his nickname, the Greek.

The exhibition will include an icon of the dead Virgin Mary, only identified when it was taken out of its frame for restoration work, revealing his signature. His last work, The Adoration of the Shepherds, is being loaned by the Prado museum and includes his own self-portrait. It was made to hang above his tomb in Toledo.

The exhibition will include sculptures, drawings and brooding portraits. One cardinal hunched in a corner of his opulent room, one hand clenching the arm of his chair, his feet apparently shuffling nervously under their splendid robes, is a portrait of a man, Mr Davies said, described by a contemporary as "sly and shifty". The cardinal will hang beside another clerical portrait of Felix Paravicino, a Franciscan friar who was renowned both as a preacher and a poet, and El Greco clearly felt differently about him - "a beautiful, and some would say sexy portrait".

The poet predicted his friend would be admired as a genius by future generations, but imitated by none - the National Gallery is hoping that at least the first part of the prophecy is true.